I recently installed 12.04 64 bit to my new laptop and it is crashing frequently but inconsistently.

When this crash occurs, any windows I have in the work space are left intact but are unresponsive. My menu bar and launch bar seemingly disappear and keyboard shortcuts are unresponsive; however I am still able to interact with my cursor on the screen.

I am using a Dell Inspiron that I recently purchased; along with this I installed a fresh OCZ Solid 3 60 GB hard drive and an 8GB RAM upgrade.

I installed Ubuntu via USB.

Please let me know what further information would be helpful to debugging my system, I do not mind a fresh install but I am just curious about how to solve this problem should it arise again.

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Input/output errors can cause that kind of freezing (I had the same issue on my SSD with ext4 filesystems). Try forcing an fsck by creating a /forcefsck file and rebooting, and see if it finds anything. I ended up reinstalling on ext2 to fix my problem, because the disk was consistently corrupted every few days.
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netcoderJul 24 '12 at 15:22